Gabe Newell On Removing Valve From Steam

The news-owls at VG247 spotted that there’s a video (below) of Gabe Newell’s recent talk at the University of Texas. In it he covers a wide range of issues relating to games, and particularly to Steam – discussing things such as the market for Team Fortress 2 hats. But what is perhaps most remarkable is that around 44 minutes, he talks about the problem of Steam being a curated store, and goes on to suggest that Valve are a bottleneck for publishing on the platform, and then even more radically, that they should remove themselves from the equation entirely: “So rather than having this curated store we’re going to say, “OK if we are thinking about this correctly, it really should be sort of a network API.” There should be this publishing model – and yes you have to worry about viruses and malware and stuff like that – but essentially anybody should be able to publish anything through Steam.”

That’s a download from the future right there. And there’s plenty more. Go watch it.